Novel Marketing · Thomas Umstattd Jr.

How to sell 1,000 books a month

July 23, 2025·32 min·2 clips

Susan Neal sells 1,000 books monthly and shares her layered marketing secrets on Novel Marketing.

1. Novel Marketing host Thomas Umstattd Jr. interviews Susan Neal, author of nine healthy living books and CEO of the Christian Indie Publishing Association, on how to sell 1,000 books a month. 2. Susan Neal is the guest; Thomas identifies her as an author who consistently reaches 1,000 monthly sales and as the author of 'How to Sell 1,000 Books a Month.' 3. The episode's core thesis is that high book sales require 'layered marketing' — multiple simultaneous channels — combined with a book written for readers, not the author. 4. Susan explains that consistent 1,000-copy months come from running podcast appearances, guest blogs, and magazine articles simultaneously, comparing the effect to building a snowball by continuously adding layers. 5. She describes her breakthrough year as one where she committed to one podcast, one guest blog, and one magazine article per month for two years, before accelerating to 30 podcast appearances in eight months. 6. Those 30 podcast appearances over eight months produced 7,000 book sales, a figure Susan attributes to compounding visibility rather than any single channel. 7. Susan's podcast-pitching method involves listening to full episodes, writing iTunes reviews, checking recent episode history to avoid duplicating topics, pitching three fresh topic angles, and linking to a media kit. 8. She reports a roughly 33% success rate on pitches using this approach, meaning one booking for every three pitches sent. 9. Thomas explains that targeting podcasts by listener demographics — not just subject matter — is key, since romance readers listen to many podcasts unrelated to romance. 10. Thomas notes that writing a five-star iTunes review of a podcast before pitching it signals genuine engagement and significantly improves booking rates. 11. On guest blogging, Susan uses Moz.com to check domain authority before pitching, rejecting blogs with a Moz rank below 10 on the grounds that links from low-authority sites have negligible SEO value. 12. Thomas argues that a single link from a Moz rank-50 site may outweigh 4,000 links from rank-1 sites due to logarithmic SEO scaling, framing high-authority blog placement as a near-winner-take-all game. 13. Both note that blogger and podcast coverage helps train AI models like ChatGPT and Grok to recommend a book, adding a new incentive to traditional media outreach. 14. Thomas states the most common reason books fail to sell is that the author wrote for themselves rather than a target reader, calling this 'a luck-based strategy' and connecting it to his 'ninth commandment: thou shalt not publish your first book first.' 15. Susan explains that her book 'Seven Steps to Get Off Sugar and Carbohydrates' took two years to accumulate 50 Amazon reviews and now has 1,500, attributing early momentum to a 100+ person launch team who each purchased an e-book and wrote a review. 16. Thomas warns against giving launch team members free books (attracts unmotivated reviewers and produces unverified reviews that Amazon deletes) and against organizing launch teams on Facebook (Amazon and Facebook share data and may mass-delete proximate reviews). 17. Susan recommends temporarily enrolling wide-distribution books in Kindle Unlimited for three months, using countdown urgency messaging, to reach KU readers who will not buy books any other way. 18. On marketing channels, Susan advises matching strategy to personality type: extroverts should pursue podcasts and TV, introverts should favor blogging and Substack; Thomas adds that introverts often become better speakers than extroverts because fear drives preparation. 19. Authors who want a structured approach to less-overwhelming book marketing would find this episode most useful, particularly nonfiction authors in health, wellness, or Christian markets. 20. Fiction authors seeking genre-specific tactics or anyone already executing all the strategies discussed at scale would find the content too foundational.

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Book sales start with reader fit, not a clever promotional trick.

Novel Marketing treats book sales as the end result of work that starts much earlier: craft, audience growth, character, ability, and fame. Its strongest point is the refusal to promise a single clever trick.

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You want the real reason some books keep selling after launch.

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